A Brief History of Pork in Poetry

Oh pig! Source of so much deliciousness: pork chops, bacon, ham, ribs, roast, rump, loin. Homer Simpson called it a magical animal. A friend and former vegetarian recently noted that bacon helped woo him back to omnivorousness, and then reflected that “some vegetarians make exceptions only for bacon.” According to geneticists, we’ve been raising and domesticating pigs for around 9,000 years, possibly longer than even cows or goats. And as long as we’ve been raising them, we’ve been writing about them. There are hundreds, if not thousands of poems about pigs, pig-raising, and pig-eating. Here are some highlights:

Though the Greeks (especially Aesop) certainly wrote about pigs, the Romans may have been the first to elevate both poetry and piggery to lyrical levels. Martial (c. 40–104) was a noted epigramist, whose bitter wit skewered subjects great and small. His poem The Careful Swineherd, translated in the 19th century by Frederick Adam Wright, is a caution against taking one’s piggery too far:

Young Amyntas considered his pigs extra fine,
And was rather too anxious to pamper the swine,
Till one day while shaking down acorns beneath
He fell from the branches and so met his death.

His father condemned the fell tree to the fire
And burned all its wood on the funeral pyre.
Let my neighbours insist that their pigs fattened be,
If my man counts the herd, that’s sufficient for me.

Lest you think he was all snark, Martial was also quite the eater. The Invitation, translated by J. A. Pott, testifies to his status as a gourmand:

The priests proclaim the hour at Isis’ shrine,
When guard is changed ’tis time to bathe and dine;
Cool are the baths too hot an hour ago,
At the sixth hour with Nero’s heat they glow;

Friends, are you ready? There are five of you,
My horse-shoe couch holds seven—Bring Lupus, too.
My bailiff’s wife has gathered mallows light
And garden treasures for the feast to-night.
Sliced leeks there are, dwarf lettuce cool and smooth,

Rocket to stimulate and mint to soothe,
Anchovies crowned with egg and dressed with rue,
And pickled pork with tunny wine, will do
To whet the appetite, and following these
A kid the ravening wolf had hoped to seize,

Rissoles that need no carving-knife are there,
Spring cabbages and beans—the labourer’s fare,
A fowl, a ham that twice has served: and last
Sweet apples come to crown the whole repast.
Then as to home-grown wine, I know ’tis clear,

Free from all crust, for it was made this year;
Gay jest and kindly wit shall this beget
With naught to bring repentance or regret;
Safely we’ll gossip of the racing season,
The cup shall stir no guest of mine to treason.

Pork (and literature) were staples in China long before northern Europe had its act together, so it makes sense that some of the earliest instances of good pig-eating poetry were also there. One, by the ninth-century poet Hanshan, translated by Red Pine, denigrates delicious dishes to highlight the austere lifestyle he became famous for:

the unfortunate human disorder
a palate that’s never weary
of steamed piglet with garlic sauce
roast duck with pepper and salt

deboned raw fish mince
unskinned cooked pork cheek
unaware of the bitterness of others’ lives
as long as their own are sweet

Probably the most famous Chinese poet associated with pork is Su Shi, also known as Su Dongpo(1037-1101). Considered one of the foremost poets of the Song dynasty, as well as a noted gastronome, Dongpo is most famous for a dish, Dongpo Pork, named after him. Though he wrote many poems about drinking and eating, it seems the dish’s link to Su Dongpo is, like a certain chicken dish linked to a certain general, largely apocryphal.

The Chinese poets weren’t the only ones to love their pigs, however, and it wasn’t long before Europeans got in on the act. Seminal 17th-century English poet Robert Herrick (1591–1674) helped solidify pork’s status as a source of gluttony with this little quatrain:

Spokes when he sees a roasted Pig, he swears
Nothing he loves on’t but the chaps and ears:
But carve to him the fat flanks; and he shall
Rid these, and those, and part by part eat all.

Not all pig poems glory in the eating, however. Eighteenth-century author Robert Fergusson (1750–74) takes up the voice of the sympathetic animal as a plea for vegetarianism, in his maudlin The Sow of Feeling. Perhaps in rebuttal, the later poet Robert Southey (1774 – 1843) penned this bit of verse, called simply, The Pig. It stands as a slightly more clear-eyed appraisal.

German poet Ludwig Uhland (1787–1862) found his way to turn pork-eating into a patriotic display (and to shoehorn in an anti-Semitic slight) in his Ode to Pork translated by Walter William Skeat:

To-day, as oft in former years,
A porker have we slain,
Weak Jews are they and over-nice
Who meat like this disdain.
Hurrah for swine, both small and great,
In tame, or else in savage state,
The white ones and the brown!

Then tarry not, my trusty friends,
The sausages to eat;
And let the flagon fast go round
To crown the savoury treat.
They rime so neatly—Wine and Swine—
They fit so closely—Wurst and Thirst—
We needs must drink with Wurst.

Then there’s our noble Sauer-kraut,
(To pass it by’s unmeet),
Invented by some German brain
For German mouths to eat.
When meat so soft, so white as this
Lies in the Kraut, a picture ’tis
Of Venus rose-embowered!

And when by fair white hands therein
The fair white meat is placed,
‘Tis this that makes a German’s heart
Of happiness to taste.
Young Love draws near and laughs, y-wis,
And thinks, whoe’er would snatch a kiss,
Hath but to wipe his mouth!

Let none reproach me now, good friends,
That I of porkers sing;
For oft some mighty thought depends
On some most trivial thing.
Right well that saying old ye know,
That here or there, as luck may shew,
“A pig may find a pearl.”

In the late 19th and early 20th century, grand, verbose poets like Walt Whitman (1819-1892) and Carl Sandburg (1878-1967) celebrated the advent of industrial butchery in their respective cities through depictions of pork. Sandburg famously kicked off his ode to the Second City, Chicago, with the line “Hog Butcher for the World,” and Whitman, in part of his Song for Occupations waxed lyrical thusly:

Beef on the butcher’s stall, the slaughter-house of the butcher, the butcher in his killing-clothes,
The pens of live pork, the killing-bammer, the hog-hook, the scalder’s tub, gutting, the cutter’s cleaver, the packer’s maul, and the plenteous winterwork of pork-packing,

That passage alone contains all the grandiosity and carnality that Whitman was known for.

As for modern pork-centric poems, you don’t get more completist than William Matthews (1942-1997), whose Sooey Generistries to shoehorn all of hog history into its seven stanzas. But it may be this little poem, by the relatively unknown Richard Le Gallienne (1866-1947) that most appeals to literate lovers of the family Suidae. The title says it all: A Melton Mowbray Pork Pie.

Strange Pie that is almost a passion,
O passion immoral for pie!
Unknown are the ways that they fashion,
Unknown and unseen of the eye.
The pie that is marbled and mottled,
The pie that digests with a sigh;
For all is not Bass that is bottled
And all is not pork that is pie.

This may be the pinnacle of pig poetry. After all, if you’ve got a delicious pie and a cold beer in front of you, life has gotten about as sublime as it can get.